People waving Russian flags cheer Thursday in support of a vote this month for Crimea to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. GETTY IMAGES

The Ukrainian revolutionaries' first mistake was to abandon the agreement of Feb. 23, to create a national unity government, including some of the revolutionary leaders, that would administer the country until new elections in December. It would have left President Viktor Yanukovych in office until then, but with severely diminished powers, as the constitution would have been changed to restore the authority of Parliament.

Leaving a man who ordered the murder of dozens of protesters in power, even temporarily, was a bitter pill to swallow, but it had tacit Russian support because it saved face for President Vladimir Putin. However, the crowds on Kiev's Independence Square refused to accept the deal, and Yanukovych was forced to flee.

Parliament subsequently ratified his removal, but it was the mob, and especially the right-wing fighting groups like Pravy Sektor, who led, and the leadership who followed. Putin was humiliated, and he was given the pretext for claiming that Ukraine had fallen to a “fascist coup” as a justification for rejecting the legitimacy of the new Ukrainian government.

The second grave error was the new government's decision to repeal the law giving Russian equal status as an official language in provinces with large Russian-speaking populations. It delighted Ukrainian-speaking ultra-nationalists, but it needlessly alienated the two-fifths of Ukraine's population who speak Russian as their first language.

So, now, Putin is bringing pressure on the new Ukrainian government by backing a secessionist movement in Crimea (where three-fifths of the people speak Russian). The rubber-stamp Russian parliament has also granted him authority to use Russian troops elsewhere in Ukraine to “protect” Russians.

Actual fighting could erupt if the Russians invade eastern Ukraine or attack the encircled Ukrainian garrisons in Crimea. Maybe Putin is just bluffing; more likely, he doesn't yet know himself how far he is willing to go. But some bluffs are hard to walk away from.

Are we on the brink of a new Cold War? It wouldn't be a hot war, except in Ukraine. Nobody will send troops to defend Ukraine, nor should they. Nobody is in position to stop Russia from conquering Ukraine if it chooses to, and turning it into a wider European war (or a world war) would not help matters.

In any case, Moscow would probably not try to conquer all of Ukraine. Kiev and the west of the country would fight very hard, and after they were defeated they would continue to resist a Russian occupation with guerilla tactics, including terrorism. Putin doesn't need that, so part of Ukraine would remain free and call for outside help.

It would come, in the form of financial and military aid, and maybe even what has hitherto been rigorously excluded from the discussion: NATO membership. And there Russia and everybody in NATO would sit for the next five or 10 or 20 years, in a frozen confrontation that would include a trade embargo, an arms race, and a remote but real possibility of nuclear war.

This is not at all what Putin intends or expects, of course. He is calculating that, once he controls the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, he will be able to enforce a restructuring of the country as a federation in which the government of the eastern, Russian-speaking part will be permanently under Russia's thumb, and will have a veto on the decisions of the central government.

That's all Putin wants out of this: a Ukrainian government that always respects Russia's wishes. He's not out to conquer the world. He's not even out to reconquer Eastern Europe.

But Putin's calculations about Ukraine have been wrong every single time since the turn of the 21st century. He backed Yanukovych before 2004, and the Orange Revolution proved him wrong. He backed Yanukovych even more enthusiastically after 2010; the policy blew up in his face again. And here he is yet again, backing Yanukovych as president-in-exile.

If he continues down this road, he will cause a quite needless political disaster.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.

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